Your Letters

May 01, 2009

Spring Weekend: What's The Point?

The April 29 Fresh Talk article "Bingeing On Opportunity At UConn" was right to point out the many positive opportunities that UConn provides for its students. However, by dismissing the madness of Spring Weekend as just another party, the article misses a larger point.

As a graduating senior, I have seen more than my fair share of Spring Weekend parties, and each year I am left asking: What is the point? UConn would still be a good school without the annual parties, and the only thing that would be lost would be the opportunity for thousands of students to get drunk in public while dozens of their classmates and friends get injured or arrested.

UConn is a fine school that provides students with hundreds of different opportunities to learn and grow. However, the parties of Spring Weekend are not one of those opportunities. All they are is a chance for 15,000 students to get drunk in a parking lot.

Andrew Porter, Storrs

No Shortage Of Instructors

In the April 22 article "Double-Dip Limits" [Page 1], The Courant again repeated a claim made by University of Connecticut officials that to replace a retired accounting professor who is paid about $81,000 to teach four courses a year, "a new tenure-track professor would cost at least $130,000 a year."

This is nonsense, and I am dismayed that The Courant has printed this comment several times without challenging it. Surely there are numerous qualified instructors who would be willing to teach two accounting courses per semester for the fall and spring semesters, essentially nine months of part-time work without research responsibilities, for $81,000, even if no benefits are attached.

I worked as an accounting instructor at UConn for 20 years and was a finalist for a national teaching award in 2004. I then spent 2 1/2 years teaching in a special UConn project that established a bachelor's degree program at a new university-level institute in Indonesia, only to return to Connecticut and find myself unemployed. If UConn ever decides to replace that accounting professor, I and many others would be happy to fill the position.

Gerry Murphy, West Hartford

Free Lunch Doesn't Sway Doctors

Unfortunately, despite the good intentions underlying draft legislation to ban pharmaceutical gifts [editorial, April 26, "No Free Lunch For Doctors"], it appears no one spoke with the physicians struggling every day to take care of their patients and provide the highest quality of medical care. If so, they would have known that public actions lag far behind that of organized medicine.

Connecticut's medical schools and physician practices have in large part adopted the American Medical Association Code of Ethics or even more restrictive policies of their own.

Although we support many of the concepts of the legislation, much of the verbiage in the public debate and the editorial reflects misdirected anger toward physicians. It is an insult to the integrity of the women and men who care for Connecticut patients every day in its implication that they are routinely bought with a pen and a ham sandwich. Patients who truly believe their doctor is susceptible to such practices should find other physicians.

As written, the legislation will also have a chilling effect on clinical trials because the public disclosure of funding for physicians over $1,000 will appear on paper as if physicians are taking a payout rather than paying for staff and other practice costs to make up for time lost to their practices working on such research.

As for The Courant's suggestion that physicians wait for information to be published in medical journals before consulting with the companies that have developed the medicines patients need, Connecticut's patients would be left untreated, or perhaps inefficiently treated, for years while physicians waited for such information. That's no one's idea of good medicine.

I was taken back by the editorial regarding physicians getting free lunch and the cost of marketing products.

To think that a physician is going to feel obligated to use a particular drug because of a free tuna sandwich is ridiculous. It is also quite insulting to the physicians, to say the least. Is a vascular surgeon going to use a particular graft for heart surgery because of a turkey sub? Please!

Is there any legislation banning our banks or mortgage companies (that have taken taxpayer dollars) from lunches with clients - or, for that matter, a law banning legislators from having lunch with anyone?